How to Choose the Right Certified Background Check Company

As a Human Resources Coordinator who’s already evaluated your company’s needs, reviewed the budget, and sought out a number of quotes and proposals, you’re faced with a decision:

Which background screening company will you choose to move ahead with your hiring process?

We realize you don’t want to spend days agonizing over this decision. In fact, the faster you can get this task done, the faster you can move on to other important priorities. Analysis Paralysis leads to lost time, money, and opportunities. But you also don’t want to rush into a poor decision.

The following are three factors that you need to consider as you compare potential background screening partners and make your decision. It only takes a few minutes to read and a few additional minutes to compare this information to your list of screening options. You should then be able to confidently decide on the best option and move forward with no more wasted time.

1. Experience

Experience is absolutely vital when considering which background screening company you’re going to trust with your future job candidates.

Once an employee is officially hired and contracts are signed, it becomes much more difficult to sever ties with that individual, even if you realize you’ve made the wrong decision. And where ineffective background screening is involved, that realization could come along with a regrettable or even dangerous situation that can cost the company a lot of money and even ruin the company’s reputation.

Making sure you’re bringing on employees who are truly qualified for the job is of prime importance: by ensuring you’re aware of any unacceptable traits or circumstances from their past, you can offer a valuable level of legal and physical protection for your company and for your coworkers. Although any crime committed by an employee while on the job is likely to remain their personal responsibility, if it’s found that the individual could easily have been found out as a risk and then put into a position where they could commit the crime because your company failed to conduct their due diligence, it could quickly evolve into a costly lawsuit or worse.

Without question, you need to be able to completely rely on the skill, resourcefulness, and thorough attention to detail of the background screening partner you choose. And that level of confidence is best based on a long history of proven success.

Additionally, limiting your selection to strictly certified background screening companies ensures they have adequate skill and experience to be qualified in the eyes of a third party certification organization, such as the EEOC.

2. Customization and support

For many of the same reasons you need a certified background screening provider with experience, another factor you must consider is how willing and able the background screening company is to customize their workforce solution to your unique needs while continuing to provide support after the initial contract is signed and the check is cashed.

Although the basic procedures are straightforward for various forms of employee background investigation, a customized approach to your specific hiring needs is going to be of far more value to you and the company than a one-size-fits-all package deal.

Likewise, the prospective screening company’s willingness to educate and guide you through the entire process shouldn’t disappear after you make your purchase. If you have questions or concerns during or after the contracted services are completed, can you expect to hear from them again? If not, are you comfortable with that?

Again, with something as important as the legal and physical safety of your company and coworkers at stake, you need to be confident the provider you choose isn’t just selling employee screening services, but that they are truly going to be what your company needs: a background screening partner with a long-term relationship in mind.

3. Price

Of course, the final cost of the service you choose is important. You’re not in a position to dramatically increase your allotted budget, if at all. Realizing that, some screening companies offer shockingly low rates (such as unlimited searches for just $9/month), which are understandably tempting for any budget-conscious HR professional. (We’ll be diving a little deeper into these kind of too-good-to-be-true screening offers in a future article.)

But it’s important to note that price should never be the highest priority factor in your decision. If it is, you’re effectively making a decision ahead of time to settle on the lowest bidder, and that will often equate to a lower level of quality.

An experienced pre-employment screening partner with a long-standing reputation for high quality work and who follows up with valuable and extensive support services may charge slightly more than a less experienced provider who doesn’t measure up in those other areas. You should strongly consider the accepted truism that “you get what you pay for.” In other words, a higher initial cost is likely to be a worthwhile investment if the partner you choose is adding value by means of quality and support.

Making your decision even easier

You may not be currently sitting there reading this blog post with a folder full of proposals on your desk, so this may not be a decision you need to make today. But just in case that is the position you’re in right now, we’d like to offer one more bit of information to help you:

NationSearch is celebrating over 30 years as a leader in the pre-employment background screening industry, and we’re proud to have built hundreds of long-standing customer relationships that have lasted years.

We help every client develop a customized package of background screening services designed to meet all their unique business, regulatory, and compliance requirements, every time.

We are very competitively priced and back up every purchase with a comprehensive range of support services to ensure that we exceed our clients’ expectations.

So, if you are ready to move forward with confidence, contact NationSearch today to get your pre-employment background screening underway.